Tuesday, February 9, 2010

The only thing keeping me awake at this moment, besides an abiding passion for typing adjectives into a digital publishing platform, is a handful of Sour Patch Kids. They’re delicious, a scientific fact I don’t intend to contest tonight, and the real issue at hand is how aging has exerted its grim, inevitable grip on me. It’s shortly after midnight now. If I were to travel back ten, even five years, I’d be getting my second wind at this hour. But since I don’t have a time machine, I’m stuck in the here and now, firmly at the till of a wholly different time machine that only moves forward, ever forward.

It’s not like I had a particularly tiring evening. Mainly I ate at a business dinner, worked in a few sips of wine, and now, four hours later, it feels as if I’ve finished a half-marathon, or how I imagine a healthy run would feel. I suppose if I did exercise regularly, energy levels would be elevated, but the marked difference would still be there. I’m getting older, and there will be consequences.

There just isn’t any way around it. I’ve been noticing white hair on the rise, which is a trend that speaks ably to the larger narrative, I believe. Reversal isn’t an option here. The slow march is going to happen, whether I like it or not. Certainly I can get by with plucking now, but there will soon come a point when the ratio shifts and removing all the whites may, in fact, result in baldness, if it hasn’t already happened on its own accord. I could attempt to mask the white, defy it, with hair dye, though I’d risk looking like Coach K or Astro Boy. I wonder if the answer is to simply let it be, gracefully. It may be time to sleep on this.